Joseph C Pappalardo, MD

My wife and I have been taking our son to Pediatric Partners of Jeffersontown for years. The nursing and office staff have always been lovely but we’ve always had mixed feelings about the doctor patient relationship. We just chalked it up to lack of bedside manner. We are an educated working class family that rely on Medicaid for our Child’s insurance. Unfortunately, we’ve always felt an explicit bias in our treatment over the years. I commonly receive a lecture on the health effects of diabetes which I shrug off as well intended but condescending. My wife has extensively researched the health effects, treatments and advances in technology of our son’s disease to create an “action plan”. We have always been vigilant when it comes to our sons well being keeping his A1C levels in the 7’s with an adjustment period as he is now an adolescent which is normal. (We focused on correcting that number and did so) our son has used an insulin pump for almost 10 years which calculates ratios and… allows independence. Our most recent and last visit was due to flu or cold like symptoms. We were seen by doctor Sarah Diebold which I had met one other time. The focus became an attack on our “action plan” that spiraled out of control. I can’t say the actions were unprofessional but I can say it strongly reeked of implicit bias. I was made to feel negligent and uninformed which couldn’t be further from the truth. I felt like Doctor Diebold made assumptions that caused a breakdown in communication that lead to a demeaning lambasting by Doctor’s Diebold and Pappalardo which outlining the worst case scenarios of type one diabetes, leading to brain damage and death! Which was wildly inappropriate and traumatic for our son. After politely pushing back on feeling degraded the bias continued. As we were waiting in the examining room for the results of a flu text I’d over heard Doctor Diebold speaking to the endocrinologist portraying me as uninformed and inept parent, which was a tipping point. My point isn’t the poor patient doctor relationship or the inappropriate dressing down of my son and I received. Rather the tone and assumptions that we don’t know how to manage and mitigate type one diabetes because we’re a black and brown family on passport. the tone and assumptions that we didn’t know how to manage and mitigate type one diabetes because we’re a black and brown family on passport.